Opinion: On the Campaign Couch ... with JB.(Jeremy Bullmore )(Column)

Q: I'm the chief executive of a small network-owned agency with a reporting line through to New York and I'm struggling to cope with the Americans' need to meddle in everything we do. Culturally, they have no idea what works over here, which has led to a number of excellent and amusing campaigns being pulled because they quite simply don't get the joke. How can I tell them to stay out of our business?

A: All readers will instinctively sympathise. You've pressed every button.

In The White Hat, there's You: small, creative, culturally sensitive, British, talented and amusing. And in The Black Hat, there's Them: a huge network, American, humourless, culturally insensitive, and a right bunch of meddlers.

It's a no-brainer, as those of little brain are always saying.

But just before I join the wailing chorus of sympathisers, let me probe a little further.

You are owned by this network, yet I detect no sense of one-ness. You refer to them as Them and to you as We. Are you ever Us? Then again, you make no mention of clients. Who are they? National or international?

If national, don't they ever resent having their excellent, amusing and effective campaigns pulled by some remote, uncultured American? It is, after all, their money. And have you never defended one of your elliptical, gnomic, post-ironic and amusing campaigns on the grounds that only the Brits would understand it only to discover a few million quid later that they didn't?